PUNCH is happy to present its first comissioned project:
within Caminul Cultural 2015 program, a thematic micro-library covering a wide spectrum of issues related to gender, feminism and queerness. An array of over 40 publications will be available for reading at PUNCH (Piata Pache Protopopescu 13, 3rd floor) , from 22 of October through 20 of December.

Căminul Cultural is a project developed by Solitude Project Cultural Association and supported by ERSTE Foundation.

A - B - C

ADAPTATION THEORIES

Since the 1990s, ‘adaptation studies’ in the humanities have expanded beyond the institutionalized boundaries of area studies. Burgeoning with scholars seeking to develop metatheories to account for multifarious adaptation processes, many adaptation theorists become mired in dyadic comparisons of literature and film, or arguments about fidelity and intent. All too often, their works offer generalizable theories while overlooking prior scholarship, or gloss over the very cultural objects they purport to study. Adaptation Theories includes essays that challenge the boundaries of art history, visual and cultural studies, queer theory and film studies. Whether analyzing the theoretical misprision of Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, the parasitic infestation of Panoram jukeboxes by the American porn industry, or the ontological slippage that takes place when we perform an act of homage, the essays and interviews in Adaptation Theories envision fresh possibilities for considering the transdisciplinary potential of adaptation.

AFTERSHOW:PAULINE BOUDRY / RENATE LORENZ

As an artists' book, Aftershow engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists’ investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances. The book’s title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories.

Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

BODY OF WORK

BODY OF WORK is the first publication of the feminist collective FAK. It is devoted to the linkages between body and work: The significance of the outer appearance on the labor market has increased, our body is supposed to represent our adaptability as well as our individuality. We are surrounded by others who are speaking the body language of success, assuring us that we can make it just as far as long as we work hard enough on ourselves. This makes us dream of social advancement, but while our surface shimmers and glows the appreciation of our work is often missing. Within this issue, a dynamic arises between assertion and appearance, between theory and practice, between a stance of subversive refusal and radical advocacy, between a collective body of FAK and the work of each individual. Instead of solving contradictions FAK wants to celebrate its Body of Work in all of its ambivalence.

Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Artists

Bringing together artists from different parts of the continent, this group exhibition strives to define and articulate notions of feminism and sexuality in the work of women artists whose body (their own or that of others) serves as a tool, a representation or a field of investigation. The critical resonance of a specifically African – and black – feminism, together with the spread of artistic practices to international networks, have given shape to the development of a black feminist art. Stemming from the continent and the Diaspora, this black feminist art depicts bodies that continue a tradition of activism and freedom of speech.

Brice Dellsperger's Body Double is the first monograph ever published on the artist's already cult film productions, with a long essay by art historian Marie Canet that addresses filmic remake, but also issues of models, gender politics, and representational chaos. Consisting in a large body of unpublished images, the book also invites the reader backstage—as in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, after which this book is modeled—into the Dellspergian camp film factory, to get a closer look at the characters and personas that populate the Body Double series, and that are creations both of the artist and of his main performer and muse, Jean-Luc Verna.

C MAGAZINE 104:
CONTEMPORARY FEMINISMS

Issue 104 "Contemporary Feminisms" includes: A feature article by Jen Hutton on Lady Gaga and feminist camp, and essays by Helena Reckitt on female modernists and their influence on contemporary feminist art, and by Emily Roysdon on "Ecstatic Resistance"; Deborah Root covers the Istanbul Biennale and Miles Collyer reports from the New York Art Book Fair; with book and exhibition reviews from Los Angeles, Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto; noteworthy books, editions, multiples and projects; artist project by Onya Hogan-Finlay.

C MAGAZINE 125: ATTENTION

Includes features by Shannon Anderson on An Te Liu; Mark Clintberg on the still life in the work of Celia Perrin Sidarous and Peter Morin; Kari Cwynar on Experimental Comedy Training Camp; Queering Citizenship by Maeve Hanna; Cameron Hu on GCC and geopolitical style; and Godfre Leung on attention, oblivion and jubilation in the work of Jeremy Shaw. Also included is an artist project by Raymond Boisjoly, reviews of recent exhibitions of works by --- and others, as well as our regular sections On Writing by Art + Feminism, Inventory by Kitty Scott, and Artefact by Duane Linklater.

C MAGAZINE 126: PREDECESSORS

Includes features by Zoe Todd on Indigenous law in the work of legal scholar Val Napoleon and filmmaker Loretta Todd; Maiko Tanaka on feminist citation; Liz Park on the video installations of Cornelia Wyngaarden; Jesse McKee discussing video and sound art by Adrian Piper, Newsreel Collective and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker; and a special section with Corrine Fitzpatrick, Vera Frenkel, Jacob Korczynski, Chris Kraus and others writing about teachers, mentors and "weird elders." For the artist project, Danielle St-Amour and Xenia Benivolski parasitize the magazine by producing their publication REARVIEWS No. 3 within the margins of the reviews section. Also included are reviews of Paul Chan's New Lovers erotica book series, and of exhibitions by Myfanwy MacLeod, Max Becher and Andrea Robbins, Eleanor King and others, as well as our regular sections On Writing by Helen Reed, Inventory by VSVSVS and Artefact by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay.

CROSSDRESSER'S SECRET

The eighteenth century was an era of violent contrasts and radical change, intellectual brilliance and war, spies and diplomatic intrigue, elegance and cruelty. One of the century’s most mysterious figures was the Chevalier d’Eon, who lived as both man and woman, French spy and European celebrity. Written from the perspective of this historical figure, the novel by Brian O’Doherty—artist and author of, among others, the critical milestone Inside the White Cube and the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Deposition of Father McGreevy—reveals d’Eon’s radical modernity, certified by his attitudes to gender and his examination of his own nature. He ponders the social determinants of sexual identity and studies the manners and conventions governing discourse between the sexes. At the same time, as diplomat and spy, he is involved in the power politics of nations. The novel holds close to historical facts and reproduces some of d’Eon’s comments as recorded in his voluminous journals. Apparently his life did not become real to him until he had rehearsed it in writing.

“Ravishingly written, meticulously researched, and ingeniously plotted, Brian O’Doherty’s picaresque novel is on par with Hilary Mantel’s evocations of the treacherous court of Henry VIII. Brian O’Doherty’s profound meditations on personal identity and political secrecy impart both an unexpected timeliness and a rare psychological depth to unforgettable scenes of ancien-régime duplicity, debauchery, and self-deception.”
—Martin Filler, contributor to The New York Review of Books

D - E - F

Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wit, a wild child, a writer, a go go dancer, a mother, an unlikely queer icon, an alchemist, a lightning rod in dark times. A child of suburban 50‘s Maryland and post-beatnik 60’s freakdom, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious and sublime stories and short fiction and a maven of the Downtown art world. Edgewise tells the story of Cookie‘s life through an oral history composed from over 80 interviews with the people who knew her. After tracing back some of the steps of the author’s 7-year trip in search of Cookie, the voices take us from the late 60’s artist communes of Baltimore to 70’s Provincetown where romantics and queers crawled the dunes and discos, to the sleepless creative high of post-industrial Bohemian New York, through 80‘s West Berlin and Positano, and into the depths and contradictions of Cookie’s life and loves.

Since her death from AIDS in 1989, Cookie’s work and life have made her an underground icon. Her original texts, first published by Hanuman Books and Semiotext(e), have been

reprinted by Serpent’s Tail, and she is remembered for her appearances in the No Wave films and theater of Amos Poe, Michel Auder, Gary Indiana and others.

Along with the text, Edgewise consists of original artwork, unpublished photographs and archival material, and photo contributions by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others.

G - H - I - J

GENDER AGENDAS: SUZANNE LACY

Published to accompany the exhibition “Gender Agendas” at Museo Pecci Milano, this book covers Suzanne Lacy’s whole career, presenting a selection of her major projects: from the pioneering Prostitution Notes (1974), an artwork that combines conceptual and performance art with social commitment focused on the theme of prostitution exploitation in some areas of Los Angeles, to Crystal Quilt (1985-1987), probably Lacy’s most famous work, a huge performance which involved 430 women over 60 seated at tables arranged in the pattern of a large quilt created by Miriam Shapiro, mingling their memories with sociological analyses of society’s failure to exploit the potential of old age, to Storing Rape (2012), a discussion among important media personalities, activists and politicians in the attempt to find a different way of describing sexual violence. “Suzanne Lacy is an artist of fundamental importance for the development of art in the last few decades,” the curator of the exhibition and Director of Museo Pecci Fabio Cavallucci writes in his contribution to the catalogue. “In the first place, she has challenged the basic principle of the tradition of creative production, i.e. the monolithic figure of the artist. Since the 1970s, Lacy has preferred the model of the conductor, primus inter pares, whose main aim is to activate a system of collaborations, to that of the single artist, the solitary demiurge who creates work thanks to a superior intuition. Her works are generally the result of multi-layered cooperative activity: with other artists, various institutions, associations or groups, with whom she shares the creation of the project, and obviously also its authorship.”

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Providing a much-needed forum for interdisciplinary discussion, GLQ publishes scholarship, criticism, and commentary in areas as diverse as law, science studies, religion, political science, and literary studies. Its aim is to offer queer perspectives on all issues touching on sex and sexuality.
In an effort to achieve the widest possible historical, geographic, and cultural scope, GLQ particularly seeks out new research into historical periods before the twentieth century, into non-Anglophone cultures, and into the experience of those who have been marginalized by race, ethnicity, age, social class, body morphology, or sexual practice. A notable feature is "The GLQ Archive," a special section featuring previously unpublished or unavailable primary materials that may serve as sources for future work in lesbian and gay studies.

GROUP.SEX

The texts in group.sex discuss political groups and languages, abstract radicalism and art, feminism and bohemianism, social hierarchies, and telematic friendship. In his text “Remarks on the RAF Spectre”, German sociologist and cultural critic Klaus Theweleit discusses “the unreal linguistic situation in post-war Germany” and analyzes modes of mutual exclusion and hierarchy as they occured within groups such as the RAF (the Red Army Faction).

“It’s not just the languages that had closed down, the streets were closed as well. The very thing that had been gained – the streets, publicity, openness and linguistic diversity on all sides – disappeared into the gutter of history in two, three years. ... In the groups that remained publicly relevant, the ‘K-Groups’ and the RAF, which were shifting towards the centre of the political movement as the remaining ‘radical’ groups, language and thought became restricted. This led to what I would now call ‘abstract radicalism’, a radicalism that limited itself to gestures, claims, demands, revolutionary attitudes broadcast in statements, slogans, but hardly any analysis was carried out. ... things had to ‘be right’ only in a mindlessly abstract sense. The ‘concrete’ emigrated from radical left-wing politics (and found a home, for a time, in the women’s movement).” Klaus Theweleit

The Jahresring series is one of the longest continually published annual journals for contemporary art in Germany. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions from visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Bringing together a discursive array of forms and timbres, it takes an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to exploring some contemporary cultural resonances with respect to gender and sexuality. In this sense, a “PS” or postscript might be understood as a place where relations or realities not explicitly stated in the main body of any given text, but nevertheless underpinning them, are revealed. A “PS” is a place of interpersonal agency; a compelling textual gesture that might add a “by the way” and an “also” and a “you know what we’re really talking about.” By its nature, a “PS” is contextualized and contextualizing. Though it may parade as the last word, it never is.

Expanded from a touring exhibition originated at Para Site in 2013, this book critically analyzes historical and contemporary imaginations and politics of fear in the face of disease and the specter of contamination in society and culture. Scholars, artists, novelists, and journalists depart from Hong Kong’s history of epidemic—the most recent being the SARS outbreak of 2003, shortly followed by the tragic death of pan-Asian pop icon Leslie Cheung, and tackle the galvanizing power and the varied perceptions of contagion in the context of lingering histories, myths, anxieties, and memories across geographies. While composing a complex picture of the Hong Kong psyche, these contributions speak from a humanistic and global perspective, pointing to the intersections of urban environments and post-colonial psychology, popular culture and racism, public health and migration, national identity and art.

K - L - M - N

KIM GORDON:
IS IT MY BODY?

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. Despite economic instability, growing income gaps across countries and the rise of a migratory, flexible and underpaid labor force, our commitment to productivity is unflagging. Today, work enlists us to psychologically invest ourselves in a boundaryless work life, which seeks to instrumentalize all of our waking hours. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future.

No Is Not an Answer is the largest presentation of Marie-Louise Ekman’s art ever featured in the form of a book. As one of the most influential artists in Sweden in the postwar period, Ekman was both part of Swedish pop and the rebellious underground in the ’60s and ’70s. She created a unique body of proto-feminist work, which draws equally from the playful imagination of a young woman and popular culture in the social welfare state. She has directed more than a dozen films, TV series, and plays, and since 2009 she has been the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.

The result of a collaboration between Tensta konsthall and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and an offshoot of the exhibition “Doing what you want: Marie-Louise Ekman accompanied by Sister Corita Kent, Mladen Stilinović and Martha Wilson,” the publication aims to show the contemporary aspect of Ekman’s works and to examine the wider international context surrounding the start of her career.

Jaanus Samma’s exhibition “Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale,” conceived for the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, tells the story of the former collective farm chairman Juhan Ojaste (1921–1990), a war hero and family man, who was declared “not suitable for work.” He was found guilty after being subjected to humiliating criminal trials in the 1960s for his involvement in homosexual acts in Soviet Estonia. He lost his job and was abandoned by his family. After spending a year and a half in a corrective labor camp, Ojaste moved to Tartu where he became a local legend, notorious for his active gay life. In 1990 a Russian soldier and male prostitute allegedly murdered Ojaste in his home.

This clothbound two-volume publication draws on political history in attempt to create counter-narratives that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale is telling a story of discrimination against homosexuality, and raises questions about power, violence, persecution, and powerlessness of an individual in authoritarian political regimes that curtail human rights.

An essay by Eugenio Viola offers different perspectives on social restriction issues and the LGBT community's “problem” in eastern Europe. Kevin Moss writes about male homosexuality in the Soviet Union from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Maarja Kangro composed an aria based on the chairman’s police file, and Slava Mogutin tells his own story of homophobic persecution and his eventual exile from Russia in 1995. Rebeka Põldsam and Riikka Taavetti discuss LGBT histories in Baltic region.

Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices builds on an exhibition and conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that explored the contradictory standpoints of queer art practices, conceptions of the body, and ideas of “queer abstraction,” a term coined by Judith Jack Halberstam that raises questions to do with (visual) representations in the context of gender, sexuality, and desire. It is particularly concerned with where form and politics crossover, citing the various combinations, juxtapositions, and the play between artistic strategies.

This publication brings together papers from the 2012 conference and writing on artworks and art practices. In addition to testimonials from queer performers on the topic of “drag,” the book also includes interviews, essays, collage, and more personal writing. By placing these contemporary practices in a historical perspective and revising the perceived divergence between artistic attitudes and formal approach, this publication offers diverse and thought-provoking points of view.

POST PORN POLITICS

What happens after the pornographic moment? What is the post. . . in porn? What is post to the term that is porn? Why watch porn? Why not? Or why not look for “other” porn? Why not produce post-porn? How do we theorize sex performance?
How do we produce new body- and sex-technologies? How do we celebrate critical pleasures? How do we analyze and criticize without censorship? Why affirm the fetish? Why sexualize alienation? How do we intensify the relation between theory and practice? Why is power sexy? Why is the body a victim of capitalist commodification? Why don´t we perform and show sex differently, instead of idealizing a way back to nature? A symposium on the biopolitics of pornography.

The concept called "post-porn" was invented by erotic photographer Wink van Kempen and made popular by sexwork-activist and performance artist Annie M. Sprinkle. It claimed a new status of sexual representation: Through identifying with critical joy and agancy while deconstructing its hetero/normative and naturalising conditions, Sprinkle made us think of sex as a category open for use and appropriation of queer_feminist counter-pleasures beyond the victimising framework of censorship and taboo.

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness. With great timeliness, projects by Sven Augustijnen, Vincent Meessen, Zarina Bhimji, Renzo Martens, and Pieter Hugo have emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of independence for many African countries, inspiring a kind of “reverse migration”—a return to the postcolony, which drives an ethico-political as well as aesthetic set of imperatives: to learn to live with ghosts, and to do so more justly.

S - T - U - V

SANJA IVEKOVIć:
PUBLIC CUTS

This catalogue brings the first comprehensive survey of most of public art works which Sanja Iveković has either sketched, proposed or performed “on the street” over the last three decades. As we face a time when the idea of public space is confronted by the effects of private capital, and while on the other side of that coin the feminist slogan 'private is political' still has it's raison d'etre, Ivekovic rethinks notions of public through her work.

Contributors: Bojana Pejic

SANJA IVEKOVIć:
UNKNOWN HEROINE

Taking the work of Sanja Iveković as a point of departure to discuss urgent matters in feminism today, Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine - A Reader gathers commissioned essays by key feminist voices who contributed to a conference titled ‘23%’*, which was held on the occasion of the exhibition Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine, curated by Lina ǅuverović at Calvert 22 Gallery and the South London Gallery (December 2012 - February 2013). The conference took place at the Royal College of Art, London and was organised in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art’s Research Forum.

André Gelpke’s series »Sex-Theater« was produced in the 1970s and depicted performers from a number of different sex theatres in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district. »The fascination that captivated me as a photographer came from the personality of the individual, from the performer who was prepared to realize in public the secret sexual fantasies of an inhibited society, simply in exchange for a fee.« »Sex-Theater« was first published as a book in 1981 and quickly sold out. The edition produced by Spector Books together with cpress represents a new »staging« of the series: it includes an expanded selection of images and new texts, and is presented in a form that offers this collection of photos a contemporary framing. The era that is depicted here is over, and the decline of these clubs is documented in Sex-Theater.

For years now our lives have been shaped by a crisis impacting both our economy and our personal lives. But what is ultimately in crisis? Survival Kits offers twelve perspectives on this issue—from fields as diverse as philosophy, politics, media theory, environmental activism, feminism, post-human theory, literature, geopolitics, art, and economics.

These theoretical investigations originated with artist Deborah Ligorio’s research. The book takes its title from an eponymous series of sculptures and video interviews describing situations of emergency, vulnerability, and struggle experienced by a living or a fictional person, which propose inventive tools for adaptation or resistance. A selection from this series is featured in the publication.

THE NEW [NEW] CORPSE

The New [New] Corpse explores current representations of the body in which the human figure appears fragmented, distorted, or emphatically absent in a carefully curated selection of poetry, translation, essays, and exhibition documentation. With a mission statement provided by an artist’s corporation, to a poem about corpses, and an essay about how Billy the Kid changed American mythology, these works emphasize the strange and residual power of material bodies, distorted and skewed through representation. It is produced in conjunction with a group exhibition of the same name.

W - X - Y - Z

WHO TOLD YOU SO?!
THE COLLECTIVE STORY VS. THE INDIVIDUAL NARRATIVE

Only accountable to ourselves, Who told you so?! - The collective story vs. the individual narrative - challenges states of social ambivalence within various levels of cohesion: government, organization, scene and family. Abstractly informing our collective subjectivity and practically nurturing our personal, existential momentum, here we may inform our experiences along the lines of the poetical and critical postures presented. The postures included here inform on our whereabouts. Having the opportunity to feed our individual narrations, we may enable ourselves to challenge the collective stories written to us. Come and play upon ambivalence in cohesion’s truths and face up to what we might consider ambiguous!The various concentrated gestures and scenarios in this project offer surprising and revealing perspectives of the conditionality of individual freedom within the social configurations in which we find cohesion. Fascinating, relevant and intriguing, now that collective freedom is at odds with individual liberties and individual liberties are at odds with the collective associations by which they should be represented. Belonging to any group makes you an accessory and if you don’t belong, you are not allowed to assume that responsibility. Whatever happens if you belong to a group without wanting to, we usually do not know... We live in times of great social ambiguity.

Trying to find new challenges and widening perspectives, often double-tongued as well as hiding a secret agenda, this project looks for deeper relations. Forty artists, ten writers and four poets use their astute authors’ skills to offer a thought-provoking ambiguity. This bundle will offer conformists an insight into the restrictions of freedom they are responsible for, will inspire freethinkers who feel they lack something and try to find a position, and it will provide recognition to those who feel oppressed.

Women and Gender in Postwar Europe charts the experiences of women across Europe from 1945 to the present day. Europe at the end of World War II was a sorry testimony to the human condition; awash in corpses, the infrastructure devastated, food and fuel in such short supply. From Soviet Union to the United Kingdom and Ireland the vast majority of citizens on whom survival depended, in the postwar years, were women. This book charts the involvement of women in postwar reconstruction through the Cold War and post Cold-War years with chapters on the economic, social, and political dynamism that characterized Europe from the 1950s onwards, and goes on to look at the woman's place in a rebuilt Europe that was both more prosperous and as tension-filled as before. This will be an essential resource for students of women and gender studies and for post 1945 courses.

YOU WOULD

The title of Matthias Hamann’s new photo book is taken from a piece of graffiti found on a wheelie bin in New York, which the artist photographed on his wanderings through the American metropolis. YOU WOULD can be read as a challenge or an invitation, or as a possible instruction for anyone who surrenders to change and steps into the light of the camera. The author takes a diaristic approach to recording his impressions as a flâneur in New York and Berlin, mixing the photographs he takes with staged portraits of the queer scene. YOU WOULD shows intimate moments and poses from a social circle with an alternative take on life.